Food Experimentation Project

Dissolved Oxygen Info-graphic Project

Reflection of Info-graphic

What ecological and human health threats might be associated with the Gold King Mine spill: initially, currently and in the future?When the spill hit there was no real threat to the health of either the ecosystem or humans. Most of the metals did not reach high enough to break the standards. Some of them we could not tell if it was above or below the standard. For example Mercury has a detection limit higher than a standard. This means that we would not know if the metal was above the standard because once it hit the detection limit the next step would be to look for floating fish. As of right now we are completely fine to swim in the water except that it would be cold. I am also sure, as long as another much worse spill doesn’t happen, we will be fine to have fun in the sun.

How have geological, biological and human factors created and exacerbated acid mine drainage and water quality issues in the Animas River?We as humans are the reason all of this happened. I can safely say that. We are the ones who dug into the ground and made that mine. I am not saying this is a bad thing, what is in the ground is a very important part of our daily lives. What I am typing on has plenty of rare Earth metals in it. What we should have done was clean up after our mess. If we had have done that we could have prevented the problem from getting larger and larger. The process is not to hard to understand. Water slowly leaks into the mine bringing all of the metals it has with it. Once in the mine it sits and waits as it gets larger and larger. Reacting with pyrite to make sulphuric acid as well as picking up more metals. Then at a point it will get large enough that when someone goes to try and start the clean up it pops at the slightest moment.

To what degree do scientists have an obligation to communicate scientific concepts and data to the public in an understandable manner?Yes, they do. Simple as that and I believe they do already do this. Except for the fact that it is hard to find the data and people just don’t care enough. The average person is going to think something along the lines of, “Obviously this is bad I don’t need science to back me up.” The thing is that the science done throughout the spill showed that the spill was not as dangerous as we had thought. Also we have the media that doesn’t show any real scientists, but shows pictures of our yellow river. I don’t know, I just don’t like the media's coverage of the spill. No one wants to look up something that is hard to find. Rather use Google, rather watch the news, rather watch a movie, rather(fill in the blank).

How has your understanding of scientific knowledge and/or the process of doing science changed throughout the semester as you’ve examined and manipulated data collected by professional scientists and performed analogous experiments to collect and analyze your own data?I have realized how precise you have to be in some experiments. For example measuring titration is a very tedious process. Often very slow going by a steady drop a second. Another example of learning this semester is the mole. At first this was fairly difficult to understand. How could weight compare to amount of that particle. Slowly, but surely I got to a really good understanding of the mole. I was then able to make a calculator that surrounds the mole and all of its complicated equations and answers them at the speed of a computer.

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